Suggestions for reading scientific articles*

Read the abstract carefully

Scan the introduction and discussion - try to identify the overall issue and overall conclusions

Reread the article - take notes and attempt to answer the questions below:

Introduction

Identify the specific questions the authors intend to address
Is the work theory based? If so, identify the theory
Identify the specific hypotheses and/or objects of the work
Try to understand how the authors use the literature to build the logic of their experiment

Methods

Identify the experimental task(s) and procedures - Are the tasks logically related to the hypotheses?
Identify the independent variables - what parameters are the experimenters manipulating
Identify the technology to be used in the experiment
Identify the measures obtained with the technology - are the measures logically related to the research questions?
Identify the dependent measures

Results

Identify the dominant results
Be sure to understand how to read the tables and graphs - identify the axes

Discussion

Did the summary of the results in the Discussion section match those reported in the Results section?
Did they use their results to address the hypotheses - If so, did the results support the hypotheses?
Did the authors generalize beyond their own results?
Did the results offer support to an underlying theory?

*Use the ones that work for you and ignore the rest